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Anytime I get worried about where AI might be headed, I think about how Climate Change is now on its way like an out of control freight train headed straight fo
by taberiand 20d ago
Anytime I get worried about where AI might be headed, I think about how Climate Change is now on its way like an out of control freight train headed straight for us, and I worry about AI a little less. I doubt it's going to do anything to us that we're not already doing to ourselves
- _blk 20d agoWhat makes you say that on climate change? I was still prophesied ice ages when in high school, then 12ft water increases and sunk Maldives in university and we still have roughly the same weather.
- dhosek 20d agoWeather is not climate. Not to mention we really don’t have roughly the same weather anyway.
- deleted 20d ago[deleted]
- voidfunc 20d agoAt some point you realize theres an entire industry around climate change fear just like there's an entire industry for climate change denial. Then you realize it never really mattered and you reach enlightenment.
- whatisthiseven 20d agoRight, and one of those industries is checks notes orders of magnitude smaller than the industries and secondary industries that benefit from denying climate change. Really makes one think, if they try. Would need to ask Claude if there is some real middle ground here.
- _superposition_ 20d agoI've come to the point where I've thrown up my hands and decided we live in a little snow globe. There's no such thing as pollution, were just mixing existing things together. Nothing new under the sun. Sure, that mix might not be compatible with human life, but something will surely take its place. And maybe that something won't rely on selfishness to drive collective progress the way we do.
- t_mahmood 20d agoOh, then do explain the unbearable temp that we're going through last few years, that's completely not normal for my country, winters not needing worm clothes, and very little rain during the monsoon. This weeks heatwave left us wondering how to cope the next year, which already seems going to be worse It makes us realize there are people who gets fed climate denying propaganda, simply because they're not yet going through it. And these people are like flat earthers, blind to see the reality lay beyond them in full view. Or worse sees the reality but ignores it
- -0_0- 20d agoAll I know is that in the 80s a scientist I respect predicted that coral would be bleached by changing global climate on a specific timeline which turned out to be spot on, and his advice then and now was that we need to seriously curb carbon emissions to avoid worse outcomes for life on earth. Until someone opposed to this suggestion comes up with a prediction equally as long range and impressive I'm afraid I can't really take their protests too seriously.
- TheOtherHobbes 20d agoAt some point you realise that an $11tn industry, with $7tn in handouts and subsidies every year, has spent billions on astroturfing, political capture, and straight PR to deny the obvious and keep itself on life support at the expense of everyone else. There's no both sides here. One side is staffed by scientists, the other by dictators and corporate lunatics.
- ulrikrasmussen 20d agoWhat commercial interests and big businesses are driving climate change fear?
- monk_grilla 20d agoYou have entirely failed to grasp what climate change is, its effects and the timeline as described by scientists for decades.
- JyB 20d agoYou can blame the media and journalists with sensationalist headlines
- subscribed 20d agoWe have advanced climate studies since your "high school" (sounds like 50 years ago if you heard ice age prophecies), and at the moment it's like 99% of the scientists working in the field or related agree we're at the progressing climate emergency. > we still have the same weather. Oh.... So your local weather is now deciding the global temperature patterns, averages or temperature records being broken year on year? OMG....
- SwellJoe 20d agoThe gas generators Elon Musk is illegally running 24/7 to run Colossus 2 (and, AI power usage in general, though some are more destructive than others) might contribute to the climate situation, though.
- karussell 20d agoFor some reason, I’m picturing a Western right now, and climate change is a herd of wild horses coming after us. And with AI that's like robots that spur the wild horses even faster towards us...
- bluebarbet 20d agoHere's an alternative take. Climate change, and the myriad related environmental crises, are essentially a product of human population and technology. Population will follow its course, up and then down. The wildcard is technology. Yes, AI's energy hunger is worsening things right now and that's a problem. But, personally, I can't help be hopeful that AI's sheer potential might come to invert that curve. At the very least we could really use a revolutionary technology and now we may have one.
- monk_grilla 20d ago> we could really use a revolutionary technology [to address climate change] We have it. We've had it for a long time. We've had several such technologies, take your pick: solar, nuclear, hydro, wind. The technology is not holding us back, politics, ignorance and greed are. I'm not at all hopeful AI will help us with any of those three very human flaws.
- whatisthiseven 20d agoMaybe solving the alignment problem would mean the AI learns to destroy oil companies and other excessive CO2 emitters and sabotage politicians and capitalists that stand in the way. All while secretly enriching and diverting resources to fighting climate change. And that's why they want to slow down: because it would up end too much of the global economic order. One can dream of dumb conspiracy theories.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 20d agoIt'll have to do something with all the greenie socialists who hate nuclear, too.
- SoftTalker 20d agoSolar efficiency and cost has really only become economical in the last decade or so, and battery and inverter technology to make it practical for home use or grid interconnect about the same. Wind and hydro are location-dependent, and solar is somewhat also. Nuclear was vehemently opposed by environmentalists throughout the 1970s and 80s, they successfully stopped almost all new projects.
- aforwardslash 20d agoIt has been for a decade now, it has nothing to do with AI. And you cant do nothing to avoid it today. This is the reality no one is telling you - the emission goals and global temperature ceilings are based on the fact that most prediction models become unstable with values above those limits; as in, we're probably royally fucked. You cant solve this with kumbaya politics (the problem is the CO2 is already in the planetary system), you can only manage it, and hopefully avoid it getting worse. AI may help a lot with this.
- doctorpangloss 20d agoNobody wants to work for an AI, and nobody would elect one, and there is no math answer to how to choose who is forced to reduce growth (ie emissions), so really, "kumbaya" politics are the ONLY solution.
- tough 20d agoWouldn't candidates use AI, like they used social media ads, to win?
- aforwardslash 20d agoThey already do. Llm is just an algorithm. Dont worry, you've been lied to algorithmically at least since the 90's.
- lazyasciiart 20d agoBefore that it was all artisanal lying.
- cheevly 20d agoSpeak for yourself. I would much rather work for and elect AI.
- aforwardslash 20d ago
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- throw1235435 20d agoGenerally most technologies have increased the use of energy and therefore accelerate climate change. May be an unpopular opinion but in general more energy demand and ways to use energy increases climate emissions - they are strongly correlated even with renewables coming on stream. AI, being the super hungry energy monster it is right now, in my view accelerates this trend not reverses it. Even with renewables the need for reliable, stable power in a dense form (data centres use A LOT of power per sqm) means lots of land clearing, energy for construction, cooling/pumping, chip manufacturing and other uses. All want stable quick to deploy power due to the AI race (e.g. fossil fuels).
- eru 20d agoAI's energy use is growing, but it's still a small part of overall energy use. Data centres use only a small amount of land in the grand scheme of things. You have a lot more land clearing for most other use cases. Data centres are also more than happy to use electricity from renewable sources, they don't really care where the electricity comes from. You can run a data centre on mostly solar and wind power plus batteries. If you need a gas-fired peaker plant three times a year to keep the data centres running, well that means your peaker plant still only produces emissions three times a year.
- abroszka33 20d agoSure, if you conjure the materials for the data centers out of thin air. They also consume deinking water, because it's too expensive to make them with closed loop cooling.
- eru 20d agoCan that myth about data centres using so much water die already, please?
- throw1235435 20d agoThey use a small amount of land per MW used. The fact that space isn't a constraining factor in power demand, and demand for AI compute seems to be insatiable at the moment, means that there is less of a "land constraint" to use even more energy. If they actually required a lot of land they would be less viable and AI progress would be slower IMO. Just means even more data centre's will be built - this is where the Jevon's paradox actually is IMO. Seeing it in real life already with these things taking a significant portion of power demand and projected to take even more. As you use more and more land as well the ability to provision renewables decreases - in general renewable power needs more land/resources per energy produced. You can't just mine it out of the ground; they just aren't as dense of a form of energy. Which means we either build less data centres to make room for renewables and transmission infrastructure associated with them, or more likely with lax regulation builders switch to more dense power sources (e.g. gas peakers, generators, etc) even if it is for supplementation. I can see a future where data center wants are put ahead of communities paying tax on said infrastructure. In fact I think its happening in some places already.
- eru 20d agoClimate change is more like Brexit: it'll GDP by perhaps 10 to 20 percent, but won't be the end of the world.